Pēteris Krupņikovs and the “intellectual turn” in Latvian historical German studies of Soviet period

The paper analyses the role of Pēteris Krupņikovs, the Latvian historian, in the historical studies of Latvian-German relations. It is assumed that the ideas of Pēteris Krupņikovs were the part of Soviet historiography, but in fact, the researcher ignored the formal and informal restrictions of historical science in the USSR. The author shows that Pēteris Krupņikovs in his academic activities ignored a hard division of history into national and general. It is shown that the concept of Latvian-German relations history, proposed by Pēteris Krupņikovs, became an attempt to revise both the research topics and their possible results. In general, it is assumed that Pēteris Krupņikovs was among the first Soviet Germanist historians who used the methods of intellectual history actively.